


Winter Garden of Our Crumbled Hearts

by Isagel



Category: Luther (TV)
Genre: Bondage, Chromatic Character, Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Multi, New Beginnings, Post Season 2, Restraints, Suicidal Thoughts, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 17:37:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isagel/pseuds/Isagel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He hadn’t known that Alice had even talked to Mark since she came back to London, with her new identity and her stories of places John hadn’t been there to share with her, her descriptions of empty deserts rife with stars as if the firmament had blossomed cold from seeds of dust. He hadn’t known, in that moment when he realized how much he’d truly missed her, when he finally let himself reach for her, that she would want to share this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter Garden of Our Crumbled Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lenore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lenore/gifts).



> A treat, because I saw you leave the prompt "restraints" for this threesome, and I couldn't help thinking "How would that work?"

It's Mark – soft-spoken, reasonable, academic Mark North with his tweed sports coats and his bohemian scarves – who slips the handcuffs on him, Mark who leans over him to take the empty mug of tea from his hand and uses the unguarded moment of proximity to cuff his wrist to the arm of his chair.

If it were anyone else, John's immediate reaction would likely be anger or fear, a combination of both that would have him rearing up, shouting, exploding into action. But there is nothing threatening or sinister about Mark, and after all they've been through, all they've shared and all they've done, after the chess games and the late nights ending with too many wine bottles opened between them on the table, after the nights that have ended later than that, in more intimate places, and the mornings after when somehow the things they've started to build in the wake of grief and vengeance have remained unbroken, John trusts him.

It's a strange realization, after Ian, after Zoe, but Mark North is someone John trusts, in a world where most people will fail you in ways more gruesome than you have the heart to imagine, and so what he feels when the cuff clicks into place is surprise, and curiosity, and a surge of sharp, unexpected excitement, a hunger to discover what comes next.

“Mark?” he asks, raising his hand so that the cuff rattles against the arm of the chair, underlining the question.

Mark puts the tea mug down on the sideboard and stands back, just out of reach. He tilts his head, studying John with sharp, observant eyes.

“You could break free, of course,” he says, voice calm, considering, the same gentle tone he always uses. “Of that I have no doubt. That's not much of a chair to pit against someone like you, I'm afraid. It would hardly be a fair fight.” He pauses. Waits. John doesn't move. “But I don't think you want to break loose,” Mark says. He reaches behind him, into the back pocket of his jeans beneath the hem of his tight-fitting moss-green sports coat, and pulls out another pair of cuffs. He holds them up, lets them dangle from his fingers. “I think you will let me put these on you, too, John. If nothing else because you're curious to see where this is leading. May I?”

He nods in the direction of the other armrest, polite to a fault. Considerate.

John makes a sound of scoffing disbelief, makes his voice heavy with sarcasm.

“And if my answer is 'No, Mark, you may not, in fact, tie me up for your amusement'?”

Mark shrugs.

“I do have the keys somewhere. You can always ask for them. But who says it's for my amusement?”

John raises his eyebrows.

“Isn't it?”

Mark smiles, a quick flash of humour at his own expense. Perhaps there's even the trace of a blush. He makes a quite startlingly attractive picture, standing there, lean and narrow with his unruly hair falling into his eyes, still dangling the handcuffs.

“Well, not _just_ mine,” he says. And then: “Yes or no?” The cuffs sway on their chain, metal catching the soft light from the reading lamp on the sideboard.

John holds his gaze, and lays his free hand down on the armrest with deliberation, forearm aligned with the padded wood.

Mark lets out a breath, a quick exhalation like the sound he makes in the semi-darkness of his bedroom when John pushes into him, and John's mouth is suddenly dry. He forces his fingers not to clench down around the wood of the chair.

Mark steps closer, snaps one cuff around the armrest, then grabs John's arm and lifts it, just enough to slip the second cuff in place.

John closes his eyes for a moment, lets himself take it in. The sensation of being caught in place, the tight restraint of the manacles around his wrists. It makes his nostrils flare, his heart speed, wanting to fight it, but when he breathes in, there is just the dust-and-earth-and-paper-books scent of Mark's mismatched rat-hole flat; this lonely, tattered, beautiful place that's made him think, more than once, that it's as if Mark is living in the tidied-up ruins of his own heart, in the one room still left him where the walls have not quite crumbled, where the scratched furnishings could be righted and the broken pieces swept carefully off the floor. It's a safe space, perhaps the safest he still knows.

He turns his hands against the cuffs, relaxes into them, into the soft cushion of the chair beneath him, into the quiet that holds him. Mark's thumb slides over the back of his hand, along the metal of the cuff. He must be leaning forward, leaning close, because his breath touches John's ear when he speaks.

“She was right,” he says, and his voice is warm, tinged with a trace of wonder, with a smidgen of the self-congratulation he would probably deny is characteristic. “Wasn't she? You like this.”

John's eyes snap open.

“She?” he asks. But of course he already knows.

They never speak of Zoe, not like this. If sometimes they share their bodies with one another, it is only with the silent understanding that they never remind each other of how they also shared hers. If John has sometimes thought – trailing his hand over the sharp edge of Mark's hip bone or scraping his teeth over his dark nipples – that her hands, her mouth must have sought those same places, that somewhere in the sounds dragged from Mark's throat there must be an echo of her touch, then he has never voiced that thought, has always buried it as quickly as it appeared. He trusts Mark implicitly to do the same.

Which leaves only -

“To be fair, John,” her voice comes from the open door to Mark's little atrium conservatory, “he did say that this wasn't just for him. You shouldn’t be cross with him.”

\- Alice.

He twists in his chair to see her, and Mark straightens up and steps aside to let him, although his fingertips remain where they are, resting against John's hand.

The touch is reassuring, perhaps protective. Hell, Mark is looking at Alice, too, now, and John can’t see his face - for all he knows it could be possessive.

That last thought is so absurd it makes him laugh.

“Well, isn’t this a charming little reunion?” he says. “What’s the matter, Alice? Gone shy of handling your own kidnappings and false imprisonments, have you?”

She’s wearing a green cotton dress (a rich, vibrant green, nothing like Mark’s muted palette - hers are the full-bloom colours of a different season), her hair falling loose around her shoulders as she crosses the floor, unhurried steps on clicking heels.

“Oh, John,” she says, and her voice is very soft. “You may trust me with your life, and your career, and your delightfully extra-legal plans for vengeance, but we both know you’re never going to trust me not to have something up my sleeve. You would never have let me catch you so, hm -” Her face lights in a wide, beatific, breathtaking smile. “- _unawares._ ”

“If this was a game you wanted to play, you could have asked. That’s what people do, Alice. They ask. They get consent.”

She lays her hand on the chair, sliding it along its back as she comes around it, a sinuous movement that brings them face to face. She leans over him, cups her palm against his cheek. Though he is meeting her eyes, he is aware of how her breasts shift in the cleavage of her dress, of the fact that she isn’t wearing a bra beneath.

Her thumb brushes his lower lip.

“You would never have let yourself say yes,” she says.

Mark has shifted, too, letting her in, yielding his place to her. He is behind John, now, his hands resting on John’s shoulders, a warm, quiet weight.

“I think you will have to concede that point,” he says. Dryly amused.

“Vampires, don’t you remember?” Alice says. “All those people you meet every day, sucking your life away. Taking parts of you with them, and you let them, because you think all those poor, fragile unfortunates’ lives are more important than yours, the dead you can’t save and the living you hope that you can, all chipping away at you. When do you ever just take, John? When do you ever keep still, keep open, let yourself receive? But you see...” Her hand slips from his face, falls on his wrist instead, weighing the metal of the cuff down into his skin. “Tonight you have no excuses. Tonight all you can do is accept the things we give you.”

It might be that his mind is trying to shrug off the wider implications of what she is saying, but the part of her speech it latches onto is:

“‘We’, is it? I must be a far worse detective than I thought, because I could’ve sworn there wasn’t a ‘we’ here.”

Back in the beginning, before everything, Alice had despised Mark, the weakness she saw in him, his pathetic striving for a civilized solution to a primal conflict, as if love was something you could reason through. That had changed with the death of Ian Reed. In the aftermath, John had more than half expected her to try and put it all on Mark, or at least to take him down with her when she confessed. But apparently giving the go-ahead for the murder of the man who’d killed the woman you loved counted for something in the eyes of a sociopath, and Mark had remained free, blameless as far as the official investigation was concerned.

That was one thing, though. This is something else entirely.

He hadn’t known that Alice had even talked to Mark since she came back to London, with her new identity and her stories of places John hadn’t been there to share with her, her descriptions of empty deserts rife with stars as if the firmament had blossomed cold from seeds of dust. He hadn’t known, in that moment when he realized how much he’d truly missed her, when he finally let himself reach for her, that she would want to share this.

It is an unexpected surprise, one that fills his chest with a warmth he couldn’t have predicted at all. He wants to touch her, stroke his fingers down her cheek with the tenderness he’s feeling. But of course he can’t.

“Well,” Alice says, quirking her lips, “by ‘we’ naturally I mean ‘I’. You know us narcissists - it’s always ‘me, me, me’.” She begins to undo the buttons on John’s shirt, slowly, from top to bottom, her fingertips skimming his skin. His heart is throbbing in his ears. “Mark -” Her eyes flicker up to where Mark is standing, a look that is teasing, and something else that John can’t pinpoint. “Mark wants to watch. That’s one of his rules.” The shirt is all the way open, and her palm strokes firm over John’s chest, a hint of nails beneath his collarbone, over his nipples. She leans in, licks at the edge of his jaw, the dry tip of her tongue against his earlobe. “Mark has a lot of rules, John. He’s very -” Her hand dips lower, slides down to cup his groin. His cock strains into her palm, and she draws her breath in, a satisfied, appreciative sound that is almost more arousing than the touch. Somehow he knows that her eyes are still trained on Mark. “- _concerned_ about keeping you safe.”

It’s suddenly very clear why Mark is the one holding the keys. There's another rush of warmth, there, a different kind of tenderness.

“Funny,” Mark says. “Mocking me for a concern you more than share.”

“We do have quite disparate definitions of ‘safety’,” Alice says. “As I’m sure John is well aware.”

“If you think tying me down without my permission is safe, I’m afraid both your definitions fall wide of the mark.”

“I rather think that debate will remain academic until we let you loose, don’t you?” Alice says, and Mark laughs, a strong, living sound behind him, shocking him with its brightness, and Alice is folding to her knees between his legs, her lips painting a path of kisses down his chest, over his stomach, and her hands are undoing his trousers, taking his cock out, and then her mouth...

“Dear God,” Mark breathes.

That wide, blood red mouth wrapped around him, stretched with him, and she jerks his trousers down, a violent pull, and her hair falls over the bared skin at his hip, her fingers closing round his balls, and her tongue is drawing patterns on his shaft and there are teeth, just the hint of a predators bite, and his hands move to cup her head, needing the touch, and the handcuffs cut sharp into his wrists, and he’s held back, held down, and he groans, arching, off the chair, into her, wanting.

“Ssh,” Mark says, and his thumbs stroke up the back of John’s neck, stroke down again. “Just let her.”

The touch is electric, a perfect live-wire circuit connecting it to the hot pleasure of Alice’s mouth between his legs.

“Bastard,” he says, but the word comes out broken, and Alice grins around his cock, mocking, pleased.

“Yes,” Mark says, and his hand slides forward, slides around, his fingers gripping John’s chin, turning his head.

John can’t help it, the way his tongue flicks over his lips - anticipation, hunger. Mark’s eyes track the movement, greedy, and then he’s bending down, over the back of the chair, and they’re kissing. Mark’s tongue on his lips, in his mouth, and he wants to reach up and yank Mark down, wants it deeper, wants it messier, rougher in the way that makes Mark pant and grind against him. He can’t reach, though, can’t, and the kiss stays gentle, gentle, _slow_ , and Mark stays just shy of close enough, moving just at the edges of how far John is free to follow.

It’s excruciating, frustrating, makes him growl in the back of his throat, and Mark smiles against his lips, smug. Pleased with himself, pleased with John, maybe, and his hand slips down John’s chest, fingers rubbing at his nipple, twisting it, hard in counterpoint to the softness of his mouth, and Alice’s tongue swirls around the head of his cock, laps at his slit, and one of her hands is on his balls, but the other is squeezing his fist where it’s clutching the armrest of the chair, warm skin and all her delicate strength and the sharp anchor point of her digging nails, holding him, and he’s suddenly dizzy with the care they are taking, their focus. Mark’s hand strokes over his scalp, fingers brushing his temple, and in a flashing memory he’s thinking of the revolver in his flat, about the single bullet and the spinning chambers and the metal cold where Mark’s touch is almost searing and he’s frightened, scared of the bullet as he’s never been when he’s pulled the trigger, panic in his chest like pain, clawing at the ever-present numbness, but Mark’s hand is on his cheek, and he’s being kissed deeper, his head bent back with the urgency of Mark’s mouth, and Alice is crawling up his body, her weight in his lap, her hands on his shoulders, and he’s alive, they’re all alive, and he can feel them.

Alice touches his cheek, and perhaps she touches Mark, too, though he doesn’t see it, because Mark pulls away, swipes his tongue one last time over John’s lower lip and leans back, straightens up. John turns his head, and there Alice is, straddling him, her pale skin flushed, her thin lips swollen with what she’s been doing, and she smiles at him. The smile that is the danger of razorblades and the unbounded love of someone who has never internalized what society thinks love should be, the smile for him alone that makes people with sanity still to lose believe that she will one day decide to kill him, that makes him certain that she never could - the only thing, perhaps, that he has left to be certain of. It’s a gift, that smile, as her love is a gift, in all its twisted, indefensible glory, fierce as an explorers first step on a new world, and it does dignify him, does exalt them both. She was wrong on the bridge; despite everything, she was right in the church. In this moment with her above him, with Mark behind him, he can choose to believe that.

She pulls her green dress over her head and lets it fall to the floor beside them.

Underneath, she is completely naked.

He hears the chains clink against the chair, feels the pull of the handcuffs on his wrists before he’s aware of having raised his hands to grab her. But, oh, he wants to. Wants to slide his palms over the curves of her waist, cup the swell of her arse and squeeze her closer.

Her smile widens, delighted.

“Be still, John,” she says, bending down to speak the words into his ear. Her hair streams, a sunset waterfall, over his shoulder, sending shivers down his spine. “Think of it as an interrogation: patience, and I’ll come to you.”

His mouth twists, not quite a smile.

“Not a tactic that ever worked on you, as I recall.”

She laughs, breathless, and grinds her hips against him, the roughness of her pubic hair and the wet heat of her cunt along the length of his cock.

“Didn’t it, now?” she says.

He gasps her name, half familiar exasperation, half a plea not far from begging.

“Yes,” she says, “oh, John, yes,” and her hand is on his cock, guiding it, and she’s sinking down around him, tight and silken.

Tight, and so still at first, her forehead pressed to his, both of them breathing too fast, too hard, their exhales mingling. Her hands bracket his skull, a hungry pressure, as if she is everything holding him together, as if she could reach all the way inside. As if she weren’t there already.

She rocks her hips, just the tiniest motion, and a sound escapes her, a whine in the back of her throat. He can feel the muscles inside her ripple, flex, work to accommodate him, and she tilts her hips, another angle, and there will be nail marks on his scalp from where her fingers clutch, and he wants to kiss that sound she is making from her lips, devour it whole, but he keeps still, lets her set the pace.

He knows he is large - overall, that’s been his defining physical characteristic since he was fifteen - and he’s never been with a woman who found him easy to take. Nor a man, for that matter, and he is aware of Mark’s hand squeezing his shoulder, of Mark’s breathing as ragged as his own, and the memory is almost unbearably vivid of Mark’s voice the first time they fell into fucking, the way he twisted his face from the pillow and said “Don’t you dare be careful,” the way he fisted his hands in the sheets and said “It _ought_ to hurt, you and me, don’t you know it has to hurt?” as if John could fuck their grief through the pores of their bodies if he thrust hard enough, until it soaked the bed like sweat, more real than tears, darker than their blood. If he could, here and now, he would reach up and squeeze Mark’s hand, would brush Alice’s hair back from her forehead with his fingertips. But they are who they are, with all their history, and perhaps gentleness is still the hardest thing to take, for any of them.

Or perhaps it isn’t, after all, because at last Alice starts to move, truly move, rising and falling on his lap, and the motion is like an ocean wave, a slow, sweeping swell, soft and inexorable, and for a moment there is nothing in the universe but the sweet, sweet climbing pleasure of her heat around him, the faint hitch in her breath every time he rubs over that perfect spot inside her, the way she holds him, apart from all the world, stars in an empty desert.

His orgasm, when it comes, is almost a surprise, the rough peak of climax unexpected in the gentle sea of pleasure, of nearness, that carries him. He thrusts up into her, suddenly desperate with need, his body convulsing, shaking, the handcuffs tight round his wrists, and she tells him “Yes, John, like that, go on,” and he’s spilling inside her, bursting open with the force of the moment, pressing his lips to her cheek, to the corner of her mouth, burying his face in her hair, the world rich with the smell and taste and silk of her.

She grinds her hips down harder, faster, and her hand leaves his face, presses down between her legs. She rubs herself with quick, jerky movements, ferocious in her last push towards completion. When she comes, her teeth sink into the muscle of his shoulder, a deep, ruthless bite, latching on, holding on. His cock pulses inside her again, the shock of pain wringing him dry, and she moans around his flesh in her mouth, shuddering, her hips stuttering in an uneven rhythm, and he can feel her muscles clenching, releasing, spasming around his length inside her.

“Yeah, that’s it, love,” he tells her. “That’s it, come on, take it.”

His voice comes out low and soothing. He isn’t sure whether it’s her he’s trying to reassure, or himself.

When she’s done, she kisses the bite on his shoulder, then lays her cheek against it, settles there as their hearts slow down, her breathing evening out against the side of his neck.

For quiet minutes, they stay like that. The room hushed and still, her warm body a blanket over him, her fingers absently stroking his chest. It’s a strangely beautiful moment, and if things were different, perhaps he would be able to rest in it for a long time. But tonight, here, this is not where anything ends.

“Mark,” he says. “Mate. I’m asking for the keys.”

The response is immediate, Mark coming round to the arm of the chair, fishing a tiny key out of the pocket of his jacket. He removes the first handcuff, then steps across to the other side to unlock the second one. His face is slightly flushed, his lips still just that little bit redder than usual from the friction of their kiss. Where his white shirt is open at the neck, John can see his pulse flutter in the hollow of his throat. His hand lingers on John’s forearm when he’s done, his thumb sweeping over the faint mark left by the cuff.

“Sorry about this,” he says, and his face shifts in a complicated expression that John can’t quite read.

“Hazards of the job of living, isn’t it?” John says. “Everything bruises.”

“Hmm,” Alice agrees, and her tongue flicks out across the mark left by her teeth. “Such a lovely inevitability in a Newtonian universe.”

John kisses her forehead and settles his hands around her waist, lifting her as he gets to his feet, depositing her barefoot on the wooden floor. He can’t remember when she took off her shoes, but he supposes his mind was otherwise engaged. His shirt is hanging half-way down his arms, and he takes it all the way off, wraps it round her shoulders. She makes a soft humming noise that is equal parts satisfaction and amusement and he smiles at her, tucks her messed-up hair behind her ear.

Then he turns on Mark.

He takes a step forward and Mark takes a step back, and the momentum is all of a sudden unstoppable and his hands are on Mark’s shoulders and he’s bearing Mark back towards the atrium doors. The ancient wood creaks and the glass panes rattle as he presses Mark up against them, presses himself in against Mark, trapping him there.

Mark is hard against his thigh, gasps when he grinds against that hardness, and the tweed of his jacket is rough against John’s naked skin, against his sensitive cock that’s trying its best to stir again, although it’s far too soon. Mark’s hands grab at the small of his back, skim down beneath the waistband of his open trousers, pulling him closer. Fingers digging in, and perhaps that’s another set of bruises forming, inevitable marks of equal forces colliding, connecting.

He shapes his palm around Mark’s face, over the deep furrows in his cheek (left by the forces of grief, of rage, of life), tilts his chin up to meet his eyes.

“I knew you were a sneaky bastard,” he says, “but I wasn’t expecting that bit of fingersmithing with the handcuffs.”

“Hidden depths,” Mark says. “You should look closer.”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? They haven’t been looking, either of them, for a long time, haven’t been seeing the world, the people who make up their world. Not in detail, not in living colour.

There is a motion reflected in the glass of the door, Alice at the kitchen table behind him, hopping up on it, her legs dangling in the air, her eyes meeting his in the mirror of the window pane when he looks up. Beyond her reflection, outside in the near dark of the garden, he can see the first spring leaves of the Japanese maple, a pale, fragile green in the shadows.

He thinks of Mark there, in that small, dilapidated space, with his watering can among the potted plants every day of the long winter, holding something alive among the ruins.

He thinks of Alice, the bright flame of her in the grey cold of the asylum, her red blood spilled again and again with the certainty of a new beginning.

“Yeah,” he says, tracing the curve of Mark’s lips with his thumb. “I should. But right now, I think it’s Alice’s time to watch, don’t you?”

Alice laughs at that, a breathless, fascinated sound, and Mark bites at the pad of his thumb.

“Well, then,” Mark says. “Don’t keep her waiting.”

He thinks, maybe they’ve all kept something alive for each other, waiting in the skies above the barren sands. Maybe it’s time at last to let themselves find it.


End file.
